A very Nick Christmas

Merry Christmas Everyone Well I have survived my trip to Moravia, land of curvy women and mysterious liquors. My journey began on Friday, with a 3 hour train ride on a well-crafted Romainian train car. I succeeded in ignoring the stains on the seats. Luckily we were not beset by any gift-deprived gypsies, so we arrived in Moravia tired and significantly present-endowed. Or actually the girlfriend was so endowed, as she was bearing the brunt of a rather large package of gifts shipped over by my mother. Friday morning consisted of some good sleeping-in. Quite enjoyable, the kind of useful present that is often lacking on a Christmas day. We lazed around for a bit, checking out the gf’s parents new surround-sound system. Then it was off to ‘Midnight Mass’, which was held at 4pm. My complaints about this were judiciously ignored by my audience, and I headed over to the town square at 3:45pm for the late-night service. On the way I saw something that I hadn’t even seen in Texas: someone riding a horse to church. The church was gloriously baroque and uncomfortably crowded, leading my gf to exit the scene and hang out in the town square. I managed to last through 3/4ths of the thing, until it was time for communion. Then the confusion began. The audience was packed in like schoolgirls at a Bon Jovi concert, and people were looking for God’s flesh like those aforementioned girls were seeking…okay, I guess that sentence would just be wrong. Anyway I had to walk out of the church, around and back in, then outside to find a deacon to receive communion. I then joined my girlfriend and a rather large mob of people outside the church, and listened to a brass band play Christmas songs. Really cool. After that we headed back to the gf’s place for the Christmas dinner. Apparently in the CR and also in Slovakia there is no meat eaten on Christmas Eve. Sorta like on Good Friday. So fish is on the menu. But this is not your Rainbow Trout. Instead it is the Carp, a rather nasty fish that, when fried in a nice crust, ends up pretty tasty. The only problem is that it’s quite bone-ridden, although I happily avoided the yearly Czech TV hospital dispatch, detailing people who were dealing with carp-bones in the throat. After dinner Jana’s mom rang a bell, and we filed into the living room for the gift-opening. They don’t have Santa Claus here – although they do have a big thing on St. Nicholas’s feast day. No, instead the little baby Jesus delivers the presents. There are numerous plot holes in this story (i.e. how does a baby Jesus deliver a breadmaking machine to mom?) but the idea is fairly amusing. Anyway, I got some good presents. Jana gave me some books by famous Czech authors (in English, of course). Mom gave me clothes and a nice pair of sunglasses. I was joking around beforehand that all the presents Mom sent me were black socks. In what was a momentous first for me, I was actually disappointed that I didn’t receive any. I need some black socks. The rest of the evening consisted of gift-admiring and wine drinking. Jana’s grandfather came over for a bit, and he spoke English. He told me how, after he graduated from college, he was forced to go teach in a crappy eastern mining town because he was ‘politically unreliable’. Imagine that, New York coffee shop denizens. For all your complaining, you’re not being forced to work out of a wi-fi-less feed store in Minot, ND. That was really interesting to hear. The evening ended with more wine drinking and eventual dozing off to sleep. Weekend highlights: 1) Endless supply of Christmas cookies. Various theories were bandied about, including a wormhole to another dimension or helicopter airlifts of sugary goodness. 2) Jana’s Mom’s determination to make me eat mass quantities of food. After ingesting a rather sizeable portion of potato salad, Jana’s mom pointed and said ‘More’. I deferred. Jana told me that ‘no question had been asked’. 3) Jana had a friend from Bolivia over for lunch on Sunday. I like meeting people from all over, and I had never met a Bolivian. Turns out that they’re pretty cool. 4) Avoiding watching ‘Bridget Jones Diary’. I actually purchased this for Jana, but managed to watch ‘Band of Brothers’ on my computer instead. I also avoided ‘Pretty Woman’. 5) Czech TV’s constant replaying of movies featuring bad claymation. So now I’m back at work, or actually not working so hard considering there is no one to do any work with. So considering Christmas is over, I would like to wish a happy Kwanzaa to you all.